Are Sony trying to start another OtherOS war with PS Vita game saves?

If you are planning to pick up a Sony PS Vita when it launches next year in Western countries, some interesting developments have been revealed with regards to how the system handles game saves and how they’ll function with the new PS Vita memory cards.

You’re not going to like this either, as Sony has made things a little confusing to say the least, by confirming that PS Vita games that require internal game saves from the game that you’re playing at that time, will not be able to be saved on to the external memory card, in case you want to transfer game saves to another device or something like that.

Furthermore, games that require external memory for game saves, i.e the separate memory card, will require the user to physically have a memory card equipped in the Vita, otherwise they can’t play at all. This means that you will not be able to play your friend’s copy of Tekken for example, if it requires external memory and you don’t have a memory card in your Vita at that time, regardless of whether you want to play without saving or not.

Sounds a little confusing we agree, but basically Sony are limiting game saves to either the game you’re playing or the external memory, and they won’t be transferrable between each other. The information gathered at Kotaku Japan also reveals that some PS Vita DLC will require the external memory card to operate as well.

What do you make of all this? Does the fact that Sony are not letting you transfer game saves between Vita game card and external memory card bother you? Restricting simple functionality like this could prove to be a big mistake on Sony’s part, just look what happened when Sony tried to remove the OtherOS feature from the PS3 – we all know how that turned out.

Is this very worrying for you that Sony are going down this route with their game saves?

It the end of the day I’m gonna buy the Vita regardless of anything they do now… The vita is such a powerful machine, why not focus on its strengths rather than some weaknesses Sony have decided to include. Also… for games such as GTA or Uncharted, why would you want to play them without saving, just buy a memory card and you’re sorted, I’d buy a memory card anyway so its not a huge put off.

PkMn

Everyone used Memory Sticks to save game data with the PSP!

Why is it suddenly an “interesting development” and a huge issue now?

Who buys a gaming device with video, music, DLC and App functions and not take advantage of it buy getting a ($20) memory card?

I swear, all these websites just blindly jumping on the same bandwagon.

Hey, Alan-
Did you go to school with Jamie?
Last time I checked, Sony was still only ONE COMPANY!!!
I shudder as I write this (as an illustration), but
Is you even bothering to read what you write BEFORE you post it?
(See what I did there?)
Your punctuation leaves a bit to be desired, too. Yes, it DOES matter.

If you’re looking for a copy-editor, I’ll work (relatively) cheaply, without doing cheap work.
If you hire me, I’ll quit flaming your articles, most of which already crash and burn, grammatically and punctuationally speaking.